Optical fibers are used extensively in modern telecommunications systems and sensing systems. In many of these systems, optical fibers guide light signals to and from optoelectronic devices located in hostile environmental media such as water, oil, high pressure, or vacuum. Such environments necessitate that the fibers be housed in hermetically sealed enclosures. The fibers must enter the enclosure through hermetically sealed feed-throughs. The hermetic seal typically is provided by metallizing the fibers and soldering them to the feed-throughs.
The fibers are typically metallized using conventional manual electroless plating. An operator physically immerses batches of fibers in the various processing solutions to plate the fibers. The properties and quality of the plating depends upon many factors, especially the rate of entry into the solutions, the duration in the solutions, and the rate of withdrawal from the solutions.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult for even highly skilled operators to immerse each batch of fibers in the processing solutions in a consistent and repeatable manner. The manual process results in variation of quality from one batch of fibers to the next and low production yields. Hence, an automated system for electroless metallization of optical fibers is needed that eliminates the inconsistencies associated with manual methods.